Greenpeace Slams Apple Over Dirty Energy Used in iCloud

Greenpeace has released a report slamming Apple for the company's use of "dirty energy" to power its various cloud computing services like the iCloud, iTunes and Siri. It is indeed true that all of these services are computationally intense, that the computation is done in data centers and that data centers are huge users of electricity.

However, the rest of Greenpeace's research seems more than a little underpowered and part of it seems to be a series of whines that the data center companies are not doing Greenpeace's job for it.

You can read the full report here. The major claim with respect to Apple is that the new data center in North Carolina will only get 20 megawatts of energy from solar and another 5 from a fuel cell operation. This, Greenpeace maintains, will be a fraction of the power consumption at the site. Apple disputes this:

Greenpeace criticized Apple's Maiden, North Carolina, facility, alleging that renewable energy sources such as fuel cells and solar arrays will only generate 10 percent of its electricity needs, with the rest generated by coal.

Apple contested that claim, saying 60 percent of the power will be eventually delivered on-site from a solar farm and fuel-cell installation "which will each be the largest in the country."

"We believe this industry-leading project will make Maiden the greenest data center ever built," it added.

Greenpeace also made an error when estimating the facility's power consumption, Apple said. At full capacity, the facility will draw about 20 megawatts of electricity, not the 100 megawatts that Greenpeace alleged, according to an Apple spokeswoman.

This wouldn't be the first time that Greenpeace has simply plucked numbers out of the ether in order to advance a point. The Brent Spar fiasco comes to mind here.

But there's more to it all than just that. Greenpeace is marking companies on how transparent they are about their energy sources. As they themselves admit in the report energy usage is a key piece of information for their competitors: know how much energy your data center competitor is using and you can have a good guess at how large their center is, how much traffic it is powering and so on. So of course no one wants to release this information: no, not even to the hippies at Greenpeace.

Secondly Greenpeace is marking the companies on how intensely they push the Greenpeace agenda. They coyly call it "renewables and advocacy" but that's merely a fig leaf cover for "how well are they doing Greenpeace's job?" You'll not be surprised to find that Greenpeace marks down those companies that don't grovel at the altar of the pressure group's obsessions, as they mark down those who simply won't give them commercially confidential information.

But all of this is to be expected from people like Greenpeace. They're an advocacy organization, not truth-tellers. Their job is to twist anything and everything to get us all to agree to save Gaia, not to be impartial distributors of plain cold facts.

The one part of their report where I consider they are being truly manipulative is in their descriptions of "coal and dirty energy." What they actually mean is "coal and nuclear energy". And that really is a gross distortion. For the basis of their concern is CO2 emissions, the problems that these will cause for climate change. But to include nuclear energy as being a form of electricity generation which causes such problems is nonsense. For the emissions from nuclear are lower than certain forms of renewables.

Sure, there are other problems with nuclear power but CO2 emissions just aren't one of them. When considering total cycle emissions, that is the building of the plant as well as the fueling of it, nuclear has emissions around and about the same as onshore wind, a little higher than hydro, a little lower than offshore wind and something like one half to one third of those of solar PV.

So in that "coal and dirty energy" that Greenpeace decries in favor of for example solar, the dirty little secret is that "dirty" is half the CO2 emissions of the solar that Greenpeace is pushing. Way to save the planet from global warming there guys.

As an example of what this means Greenpeace says this about North Carolina, where that supposedly dirty Apple data center will be:

North Carolina IT brands: Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, Wipro Major utilities and energy mix: 61% coal, 31% nuclear, 3.4% natural gas, 2.5% renewable energy41 North Carolina is a regulated market, and DukeEnergy is the primary utility for the western part of North Carolina where most of the biggest data centers are being built. Duke has put significant effort into recruiting data centers from Google, Apple and Facebook to the region, to utilize excess power demand from their coal and nuclear fleet of power plants. Data center operators are some of the most coveted customers for utilities, and utilities typically play a big role in their recruitment, offering discounted electricity rates for larger customers. The price of electricity for select industrial customers of Duke Energy has been reported at 4 to 5 cents a kilowatt hour, much lower than rates in most parts of the U.S. Duke Energy is currently seeking to merge with Progress Energy, which services the rest of North Carolina. Duke is one of the only utilities in the U.S. investing in new coal power plants. If Duke merges with Progress, Duke will continue to operate its fleet of dirty coal plants for as long as possible. Duke is also seeking permission from the state to allow for the construction of a new nuclear facility, while it continues to invest very little in renewable energy: less than 5% by 2030, according to current investment plans.

It's worth noting that that nuclear portion of electricity generation in the state is nearly twice the US average of 18%. So, you know, given that renewables penetration other than hydro is minuscule in the country....and that nuclear is in fact lower CO2 than the solar that Greenpeace pushes....that means that electricity generation in the State is lower in CO2 than it is in most others.

Oh, and the local utility is looking to build another nuclear plant presumably to feed all of these data centers with lovely low CO2 electricity. Lower emissions than solar cell electricity it is too.

So as an attack on Apple I'm afraid this report doesn't really work all that well. The new data center is in a State that has a cleaner than average, when measured by CO2 emissions, electricity supply, it uses vastly less electricity than Greenpeace claims and Apple is building renewables to power it anyway.

I'm not quite sure what's driven the attack. Could be just that attacking Apple gets you more attention than attacking anyone else at the moment. Could be that as Apple won't reveal commercially confidential information to the hippies they decided to be nasty. And there is always the possibility that Greenpeace just doesn't know what it's talking about, which I have to admit is my usual default assumption. You'd think that Greenpeace International could do better with the couple of hundred million bucks they've got to spend each year, wouldn't you?

I'm a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am. ...